The new series REIGN is catching a lot of buzz on The CW Network, we talk to the cast and creators about the good and bad parts of a show based on such a famous, and tragic, historical figure. Plus Bye Bye Blockbuster and Netflix (with Marvel) drops a bomb on the fans.
Marvel’s cinematic Avengers will be joined on the smaller screen by The Defenders, the culmination of four series just commissioned by Netflix. Luke Cage, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Iron Fist were announced this by Variety morning as each receiving thirteen episode commitments. The linking device is that all four series will be set in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen, which, in the comics, has been Daredevil’s base of operations dating back to the 1970s.
This rumored set of series was revealed without naming producers, writers, showrunners or casting but would be expected to debut some time in 2014. The announcement did not acknowledge if this quartet of series will be set in the same reality as the film series. If so, it would also connect these shows to ABC’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Netflix has received great attention thanks to their original series, a move now being imitated this month by Amazon Prime and soon by Hulu and YouTube. Their House of Cards was the first internet series to receive an Emmy nomination and will be back for a second season in the winter. The pay channel’s Orange is the New Black is their most watched original series and will also be back for a second season, as will their Hemlock Grove.
Since Jeph Loeb was added as a VP for filmed material, Marvel has filled in a vital gap with live-action television, something they seemed unable to crack. Beyond these four, and the subsequent Defenders teamup project, Marvel has been said to be eyeing a Peggy Carter spinoff based on the short film with Haylee Atwell that was attached to the home video release of Iron Man 3. Other series apparetly also ebing pitched to other networks.
Disney’s Marvel movies will move from Starz to Netflix after the current dea for the studio’s output expires in 2015, just in time for The Avengers 2.
DC Entertainment aso has numerous television series in development, mostly at their co-owned CW network with the Flash expected for the 2014-15 season. Fox is also developing a Gotham City series featuring young James Gordon, long before Bruce Wayne first dons the cape and cowl.
Kevin Smith and and the guys from The Secret Stash are already back into a new season of COMIC BOOK MEN on AMC. Kevin catches us up and talks about how the show has evolved over three seasons, and where it’s headed. Plus The DVR scores again for TV ratings and Alex Ross celebrates Marvel.
Word of Lou Reed’s death spread across the Internet on Sunday. For me, it was Sunday afternoon, so I can’t make this allusion. Nor will I call ita perfect day.
That’s what Lou Reed was to me. From the time his first album came out, he provided not only a soundtrack for my life, but a running commentary. His New York-inflected nasal vocals seemed to perfectly capture my own yearning for something I couldn’t define, but wanted desperately.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, this made me unusual, especially in Ohio, where I lived. Lou had a hit in the mid-1970s, but there still weren’t a lot of people who would admit to liking him. I can only believe that people bought “Walk on the Wild Side” without acknowledging that they knew it was about drag queens.
He wrote about drag queens, and heroin, and despair. He also wrote about domestic violence, video games, and Doc Pomus. It didn’t matter. It felt like he was talking to me. It felt like he knew what mattered and who cared what anybody else thought. A valuable point of view now, but absolutely priceless to me when I was younger and even more insecure.
I’m not the only one. There were millions of us. Even though his sales never reflected it, he had millions of fans worldwide. He played for a pope. It’s possible to argue that he was part of the inspiration for the people’s revolution in Czechoslovakia.
It always seemed to me that Lou would like comics. Maybe he’d like Marvel superheroes, or maybe he’d just like cool, outré stuff like World War 3. He was in a comic as himself. And, according to Neil, he was an important inspiration to another.
Despite his reputation as a serious poet (or maybe because of it), he could also be hilariously funny. He was the reason I went to see what would turn out to be one of my favorite movies, Get Crazywhere he played Auden, a singer-songwriter clearly satirizing Bob Dylan. If you don’t have time to watch the whole movie, you should still take ran minutes and look here.
(In our family, when we’re running, we sing, “We’re late for the show.”)
I only saw him perform a few times, not enough, and I never met him. If I had, I don’t think he would have liked me. He had a reputation for being mean to people he didn’t like. A woman I know who attended the dinner Neil describes above says he was vicious and dismissive to her and to the other woman at the table.
And yet….
He didn’t have to sit for an interview with Punk. Lots of musicians less famous than he would have refused to talk to a couple of kids with no published clips. He didn’t have to perform at Farm Aid.
In “Sweet Jane,” one of my favorite songs, he sings,
“Anyone who ever had a heart
they wouldn’t turn around and hate it
anyone who ever played a part
they wouldn’t turn around and hate it.”
Thanks for the life and the work, Lou Reed. I’m glad I spent it with you.
In the better late than never department, we present to you the just-released trailer for next April’s Captain America: The Winter Solider. In the trailer, you will find Black Widow, Nick Fury, the Falcon, and the Winter Soldier. Not glimpsed is Sharon Carter but she’s in this stuffed tale as well. It looks pretty darn cool.
Genre: Action-Adventure
Rating: TBD
U.S. Release date: April 4, 2014
Cast: Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Sebastian Stan, Anthony Mackie, Cobie Smulders, Frank Grillo, Emily VanCamp, Hayley Atwell with Robert Redford as Alexander Pierce and Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury
Directors: Anthony and Joe Russo
Producer: Kevin Feige
Executive Producers: Louis D’Esposito, Victoria Alonso, Michael Grillo, Alan Fine, Stan Lee
Screenplay by: Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely (credit not final)
After the cataclysmic events in New York with The Avengers, Marvel’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier finds Steve Rogers, aka Captain America, living quietly in Washington, D.C. and trying to adjust to the modern world. But when a S.H.I.E.L.D. colleague comes under attack, Steve becomes embroiled in a web of intrigue that threatens to put the world at risk. Joining forces with the Black Widow, Captain America struggles to expose the ever-widening conspiracy while fighting off professional assassins sent to silence him at every turn. When the full scope of the villainous plot is revealed, Captain America and the Black Widow enlist the help of a new ally, the Falcon. However, they soon find themselves up against an unexpected and formidable enemy—the Winter Soldier.
Based on the ever-popular Marvel comic book series, first published in 1941, Marvel’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier is produced by Kevin Feige, directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, from a screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely, and stars Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Sebastian Stan, Anthony Mackie, Cobie Smulders, Frank Grillo, Emily VanCamp and Hayley Atwell, with Robert Redford as Alexander Pierce and Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury.
In Marvel’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Steve Rogers teams up with Natasha Romanoff, aka Black Widow, to battle a powerful yet shadowy enemy in present-day Washington, D.C.
Take THE DATING GAME, add in LOVE CONNECTION then connect it with Facebook and you have an idea of MTV’s new relationship show, THE HOOK UP. Comedian & Host Andrew Schulz explains it all plus how he got the sweet gig of being on shows like this, GUY COURT and more. Meanwhile, New York ComicCon packs them in and Marvel has big plans for some lucky network .
You can tell the next installment in Marvel Phase Two is coming closer because we’re getting better looks at the final product. Here’s a clip, “When do we Start”, just released by Disney.
[youtube]http://youtu.be/ktumU-XUrWI [/youtube]
The movie opens on November 8. Starring Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Stellan Skarsgård, Idris Elba, Christopher Eccleston, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Kat Dennings, Ray Stevenson, Zachary Levi, Tadanobu Asano, and Jaimie Alexander with Rene Russo and Anthony Hopkins as Odin, Marvel’s Thor: The Dark World is directed by Alan Taylor, produced by Kevin Feige, p.g.a., from a story by Don Payne and Robert Rodat and screenplay by Christopher L. Yost and Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely.
Actress Mary McCormack loves TV and has proven it with great performances on shows like MURDER ONE, THE WEST WING, IN PLAIN SIGHT and now the new ABC sitcom, WELCOME TO THE FAMILY. Mary talks about her new role and the fun of being part of an ensemble. Plus the new TV season chalks up it’s first casualty and Marvel brings AGENTS OF SHIELD back into comics, sort of.
New York ComicCon starts in just a few days and we will be back here 24 hours early – on Thursday – with our special preview of the show!
C’mon. You can trust me, you know you can. Just tell me your secret – whisper it in my ear…
Secrecy is a’riding the autumn air. Bradley Manning, who revealed hush-hush information while in the Army, was sentenced to 30 years; Edward Snowden, who leaked details of government surveillance programs to the press, is hiding out in Russia; and the lid has been pried off J.D. Salinger’s long reclusion.
We all be watched Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., an ABC show based on Marvel’s 60s-era secret agent comic book. At least, I think the SHIELDers were supposed to be secret, though I don’t know how secret the organization could have been since its HQ was a giant helicopter held aloft by a pair of oversized rotors fore and aft. (And how did they ever keep the thing fueled?) S.H.I.E.L.D fills the spyguy hole in televisionland left by the end of Burn Notice. Now Covert Affairs’s Annie Walker won’t have to bear the burden of televised espionage alone.
S.H.I.E.L.D., the comic book, debuted when James Bond was early in his career and television had The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and yes, The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., and on a somewhat grimmer note, Secret Agent and, for laughs, Get Smart. Who am I forgetting? Oh yeah, one of my favorites: Modesty Blaise, who appeared in a movie or two, a series of novels, and an excellent adventure newspaper strip. And more comedy: James Coburn in In Like Flint and Our Man Flint.
The tools these patriotic good guys used aren’t much like what real life snoops are using, maybe on you, as you read these words. That technology would have been science fiction when the entertainments first appeared, and pretty dull science fiction at that, nowhere near as much fun as James Bond’s tool kit. Nor could the creators of spy fiction, back in the day, have anticipated just how much snooping would be going on, by both government and industrial snoops, as civilization duck-walks into the twenty first century.
It’s become pretty hard to be a reclusive introvert, if only because somebody wants to sell you something. Occasionally, though, somebody does manage it, not always beneficially. A guy named Ariel Castro kept three women prisoner on a residential block in Cleveland for 10 years. There are probably other Castros out there.
And the late J.D. Salinger ducked hordes of journalists, academics, curiosity-seekers and plain old fans for 40 years. Now, though, his privacy seems to be gone. A book and a related movie are revealing information about one of my favorite writers that I don’t necessarily want to know. Unlike you and I, Salinger did not always behave appropriately, it seems. Unlike you and I.
I don’t necessarily want to know the dirt, but if the movie crosses the Hudson into Rockland County, I’ll pay the admission, and if it doesn’t, I’m sure I can borrow it from Netflix or Blockbuster. I might even decide that the book deserves a place on my Kindle. Salinger, I’m sure, would not approve of my snoopery, and I’m not sure I do, either. But what I wrote at the beginning of this paragraph isn’t true. I do want the dirt, dammit, andI wish I didn’t.
(Reuters) Marvel Comics has agreed to settle a lawsuit by a comic book writer who sued the publisher over the copyright to the flaming-skulled character Ghost Rider.
The agreement, disclosed in a letter filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, if finalized would resolve five-years of litigation brought by former Marvel freelancer Gary Friedrich, who claimed he created the motorcycle-riding vigilante.
The Reuters story quoted above is pretty sketchy, but maybe we should celebrate anyway. We don’t know the terms of the deal and we may never know them; the only instance I’m aware of where a comics creator didn’t get creamed when he tried to get paid for the success of a character happened years ago when the late Steve Gerber tried to get a piece of the Howard the Duck action. Steve got some kind of settlement, but the terms of it were never made public, possibly because non-disclosure was a condition of the agreement. Whatever Steve’s reward was, it didn’t make him rich.
I first heard of the Friedrich suit from Gary himself, when we were guests at a small Missouri convention. He couldn’t say much at the time, just that the litigation was happening. I had immediate doubts. As noted above, comics guys had a habit of losing in courthouses. And Gary did lose the first round; a judge smiled upon the corporation. That seemed to end the matter.
Next, Marvel countersued to regain the money Gary had gotten selling Ghost Rider souvenirs at cons. You could argue that Marvel’s legal cadre had to do what they did in order to protect the company’s copyright/trademark – that’s their job, after all, and this is not the place to debate the merits of their livelihood. But I couldn’t help feeling that Gary, a man who lives modestly, was being bullied by a New York behemoth. The money involved could be important to Gary, and wouldn’t make a blip on the corporate accounts.
Then, today, the good news. Gary won an appeal and, barring further legal shenanigans, his retirement became a bit easier.
Anyone familiar with the history of our peculiar medium knows that its dominant narrative is that business guys get fat from the efforts of creative guys, who don’t get fat. (This is pretty well documented: see Larry Tye’s recent history of Superman, Gerry Jones’s Men of Tomorrow, and a lot of journalism in Roy Thomas’s magazine, Alter Ego.) But their are indications of change – glacially slow change, to be sure, but change nonetheless. When I cashed my first comic book check, we pale scriveners got a flat, one-time-only payment, for which we relinquished all rights. No royalties, no foreign income, nothing for use in other media, on t shirts, lunchboxes, promotions…None of that’s true anymore. We still don’t own copyrights on work done for the big publishers, but we are guaranteed back-end money. Some might claim that we should get more, but we get something, and that counts as progress. .
Meanwhile, in legal land, Mr. Friedrich won his appeal and, as far as I know, the efforts of the estates of Superman’s creators are still in litigation, and maybe they’ll prevail. It’ll be much too late to do Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster any good, but it might benefit their descendants.
